Top 200 Kate Elizabeth Russell Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Ik voel me niet en ik weet dat ik nee kan zeggen, maar dat is niet hetzelfde als de baas zijn.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

152. “There’s a photo of him onstage accepting the plaque, a big grin on his face, white teeth shining through black beard. I don’t recognize his shoes and his hair is shorter than I’ve ever seen it. Embarrassment creeps up my spine as I realize he probably wasn’t thinking about me at all in that moment. There isn’t a single moment when I’m not thinking about him.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

153. “I don’t think I remember anything about myself that happened before him.” I let out a laugh, rub my face with both hands. “That’s so depressing.” “It is,” Ruby agrees. “But those years aren’t lost. They’ve just been neglected for a while. You can recover yourself.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

154. “How long were you going to stand there before you said something?”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

155. “What could we have done? We were just girls.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

156. “Driven toward it, toward him, I was the kind of girl that isn’t supposed to exist: one eager to hurl herself into the path of a pedophile.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

157. “If there’s one thing you take away from this class, it should be that the world is made of endlessly intersecting stories, each one valid and true.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

158. “How easy it is to be tricked into building a narrative out of air. Out of nothing.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

159. “If I’m deceitful and cruel, so is he.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

160. “Alguma coisa que a gente escreve algum dia fica pronta?”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

161. “It’s a darker feeling, a fear of there being something wrong with me that I won’t ever be able to fix.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

162. “Do you want me to tell you it’s ok? That I forgive you? Because I don’t.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

163. “Hij liet me mezelf zien zoals hij me zag, een meisje met de kracht om met haar uit de as te rijzen en hem als lucht te verslinden.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

164. “I hope you’re waiting for me,” I say, “because I’m waiting for you.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

165. “I know how hard this must be for you,′ he says, ‘but it could be an opportunity, right? To make peace with it and move on.’ I force myself to breathe through the thought. ‘Make peace and move on’ sounds like jumping off a cliff, sounds like dying.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

166. “She looks up at me then, her eyes two blue pools. “What could we have done? We were just girls.” I know what she means – not that we were helpless by choice, but that the world forced us to be.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

167. “The whole time, I’d been discarded, unwanted.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

168. “He sits beside me, takes my face in his hands. “You’re perfect,” he says. “You’re perfect, you’re perfect, you’re perfect.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

169. “I even do laundry on a regular basis and don’t let it get to the point where I have to wear bikini bottoms as underwear.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

170. “Can I ask what’s upsetting you?” I take a breath, try to work out the words, but after a moment I shake my head. “It’s too big to explain,” I say. Because it’s about more than my poem being bad, or that I can’t pick a study spot without exhausting myself. It’s a darker feeling, a fear of there being something wrong with me that I won’t ever be able to fix.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

171. “Maybe it hurts because it might be true. Maybe I wasn’t loved enough. Maybe that lack of love shaped the loneliness he saw in me.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

172. “I open my mouth to let it all in and swallow it whole, where deep in my belly it turns into blame.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

173. “I don’t think I remember anything about myself that happened before him.” I let out a laugh, rub my face with both hands. “That’s so depressing.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

174. “It’s the type of novel that asks the reader to relinquish control. You have to experience it rather than try to understand it.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

175. “I start to realize the point isn’t really whether I like the books; it’s more about him giving me different lenses to see myself through. The poems are clues to help me understand why he’s so interested, what it is exactly that he sees in me.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

176. “I can take care of myself. Look at me – I’m ok. I’m fine.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

177. “I just really need it to be a love story. You know? I really, really need it to be that.” “I know,” she says. “Because if it isn’t a love story, then what is it?” I look to her glassy eyes, her face of wide-open empathy. “It’s my life,” I say. “This has been my whole life.” She stands over me as I say I’m sad, I’m so sad, small, simple words, the only ones that make sense as I clutch my chest like a child and point to where it hurts.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

178. “If you want to talk about luck,” I countered, “try being fifteen and having your soul mate be some old guy.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

179. “It’s easy to pinpoint when it all started, that moment of walking into his sun-soaked classroom and feeling his eyes drink me in for the first time, but it’s harder to know when it ended, if it really ended at all. I think it stopped when I was twenty-two, when he said he needed to get himself together and couldn’t live a decent life while I was within reach, but for the past decade there have been late-night calls, him and me reliving the past, worrying the wound we both refuse to let heal.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

180. “No, not crazy,” Ruby says. “Traumatized.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

181. “So when my mother asks me to forgive her, I say, “Of course I do.“I don’t tell her again that she couldn’t have stopped it, that it wasn’t her fault and that she didn’t deserve it. I swallow those words instead. Maybe somewhere deep in my belly, they’ll take root and grow.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

182. “I wonder how much sympathy they have for a girl like me.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

183. “He reaches down then and opens his bottom desk drawer, pulls out a book, and my ears prick like a dog’s. Pavlovian – we learned about that in my psychology elective last spring.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

184. “This time of year just makes me feel nuts. Like I’m running out of time or something. Like I’m wasting my life.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

185. “My rage is left onshore while I’m pulled into deep water, floating on my back, little waves lapping against my ears.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

186. “Maybe I wasn’t loved enough. Maybe that lack of love shaped the loneliness he saw in me.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

187. “I feel forced over a threshold, thrust out of my ordinary life into a place where it’s possible for grown men to be so pathetically in love with me they fall at my feet.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

188. “I need it to be a love story. I need it to be that.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

189. “I did lie. I sat there and let her believe what she wanted and felt no remorse. It didn’t even really feel like lying, more like shaping the truth to fit what she needed to hear, an act of contortion I learned from Strane-and I was good at it, able to manipulate the truth so covertly she had no idea what I’d done. Maybe I should have felt guilt afterward, but all I remember feeling is pride for getting away with it, for knowing how to protect her, him, myself, everyone at once.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

190. “Think of all the thoughtless pain we inflict. A mosquito on your arm; you don’t even hesitate to smack it dead.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

191. “Or, if I can’t scream it, I want to press the heels of my hands against the table, break through the wood until the whole thing cracks apart and the splintered pieces fall in such a way that the secret spells out across the floor.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

192. “There’s no need to try so hard. He created this mess. It’s his problem, not mine.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

193. “It’s possible he doesn’t want to see me ever again; maybe that was his goal when he had me sent away, to thrust me out of his life along with all the life-ruining repercussions I embody.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

194. “Even though I’m not supposed to, I spend most of my time reading charts.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

195. “For a moment, I hate him.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

196. “I just really need it to be a love story.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

197. “Strange to think that for them it’s just another Friday night, how easily their ordinary lives go on, running parallel to my own.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

198. “Now when we touch each other, the world doesn’t even notice. I know there should be freedom in that, but to me it only feels like loss.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

199. “He made me see myself as he did, a girl with the power to rise with red hair and eat him like air.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

200. “I wait outside to see if he’ll come after me but he doesn’t – of course he doesn’t.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell